BEWARE of losing custom PDF presets, if updating to Adobe InDesign 2025

[Gavin at MRP]

First of all, if you have your Adobe set to Automatically update your apps, you’ll want to turn that off. I went into settings, because I was sure I had autoupdates off. But as it turned out (and I swear I don’t remember setting this), you can have autoupdates selectively off on an app by app basis. And for some reason mine WAS set to autoupdate InDesign.

Like others, I also lost all of my PDF presets when InDesign updated to 2025, but if you are on a Mac, you can go to the place on your drive where Adobe stores those presets, and restore that folder from Time Machine. I restored that folder to yesterday, and I got all my Adobe PDF presets back again.

User-defined PDF Presets: /Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Adobe PDF/Settings 

I also set the Mac to only open INDD and INDT in the 2024 version of InDesign. If you let it open them in 2025, it requires a “Save As” instead of “Save” on any files you worked on, and once you save them from 2025, no one can open them in 2024, without a warning that they may end up losing some of the content of the file.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This is all normal behavior for a major update (saving only to updated/converted file format, etc.) and sometimes user presets and the like can be disconnected by a major update. All worth knowing, but not... news.

Did you have a specific reason no one should update to 2025?

[ajsirspeedy233]

Because it SUCKS!!!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Oh, okay, as long as we have a solid technical analysis of the situation. That's different.

[Gavin at MRP]

@James Gifford—NitroPress — do you mean other than the reasons I already stated in my original post? Yes, we all know things can possibly go awry updating an app (I might mention here that this is especially the case with Adobe updates), but since the PDF presests are shared across multiple apps, this is especially egregious. So, not only did it break InDesign 2025, it also broke previous versions, and Photoshop, and Illustrator, and Acrobat Distiller.

If you don't mind that, then by all means, update away!

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

It lost your PDF presets, which you recovered. I would call this something to be aware of if you have custom PDF presets (something I've never used in many decades), but not a reason to avoid upgrading altogether.

[Gavin at MRP]

Fair point. Okay, I've changed the title of my article to "BEWARE if updating to Adobe InDesign 2025".

We are required to use a lot of different complicated presets, based on what type of file, and which printing vendor a file goes to. So, for us this is critical.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

You might make the title more specific — note that it's custom PDF presets that are affected. (In some few words.) That might catch the eye of more users who would be affected, and hopefully not too late. 🙂

[Gavin at MRP]

Okay, topic title updated to reflect this.

[prop281218]

It's deleting all my PDF presets every time I quit and relaunch. That's an absolute top reason to not upgrade and wait for a fix. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay, we're still talking about one fault, which, if known, can be worked around by saving the presets elsewhere and then restoring them. Not good, a stupid glitch to have been overlooked, but easily bypassed with a few minutes' effort. If you think that's worth avoiding the update, fine, but such quirks occur in every major update and are usually quickly addressed by the devs. If I depended on presets, it would be far more worth the extra step to get 2025's improvements than any minute or two of file-munging hassle.

I (quite mildly) maintain that a strident warning not to upgrade is... excessive. The alert is certainly appreciated by all, though.

That you are surprised by the save-as file update make me wonder how many ID updates you've been through. 🙂

[Gavin at MRP]

@James Gifford—NitroPress — I've only been using Adobe for 30 years or so. In fact, I had pre-release versions of some programs when they were owned by Aldus, before they were bought by Adobe. I've been coding since I was 12 years old (more than 40 years ago), and wrote a drawing program before Photoshop existed. 

Oddly enough, even with this experience, I'm still surprised when programs are released out of beta with such blatant errors. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Okay. I've been playing Adobe roulette about that long, but because FrameMaker served my needs I didn't move to ID until CS3. I was just surprised you find the update-save an issue, since it applies with nearly every major release. My misread. 🙂

I'm not at all here to excuse or apologize for Adobe — I certainly have my laundry list of gripes and wishes — but with thousands upon thousands of facets, it's not too surprising that something as subtle as overwriting one set of user prefs happens. The right approach, though, is to raise a big red flag to both users and Adobe about the specific problem, and I'd be surprised if this was not fixed in the very next update. (20.2, that would be, since 20.1 seems to already be in circulation... and have you checked to see if the glitch happens with the .1 release?)

[Gavin at MRP]

I'll wait and let others test out the new version before I allow my team to update. My surprise was more centered around the loss of PDF export presets, than around the "save as". But, other department directors like myself, will want to know that. We can't afford to have one person in the department update their software and effect everyone else in the department who didn't update. 

When you say FrameMaker, did you mean PageMaker? Just curious. I know that FrameMaker is also Adobe, but I find it more common for people to have moved from PageMaker to InDesign. I kind of figured you'd probably been going at the about as long as I have. Actually, I didn't jump on PageMaker OR InDesign early on. I was using QuarkXPress. I got on InDesign around the end of version 1, or the beginning of version 2.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

All reasonable; I suspect the bug will be patched quickly. You might formally report it as a bug as well, to encourage the process.

I started playing this game with blueline board and glue sticks, did a lot of things like product manuals that way, as well as marketing materials. Was lucky to get a job with one of the first shops to go PC-based and went from [a bunch of early tools no one remembers] to Ventura Publisher to some PageMaker work. Used several advanced word processors [no one has ever heard of] for long-form work. About the time Quark took over the field, I went sideways into using FrameMaker, which was and is extremely capable page layout tool comparable to ID but with less "arty" capacity and much, much better long-document features. Did several books on that, and then InDesign finally hit first maturity at CS3 and I evolved over to it. (I may be one of the very few designers to go through that era with very little time on PM and scant hours on Quark.)

These days it's entirely Word+ID, but I have a copy of FM I keep meaning to find good uses for. 🙂

[Gavin at MRP]

Cool stuff! The "good ole days". Thanks for the walk down memory lane. 

I started out on "the other side of the wall" running printing presses, but was always interested in the DTP side of things, so I'd stay after work and help out in Prepress. I still remember the coming of Quark. I had left home (Seattle) to work in Chicago, and the place where I was working had some room with a big mainframe in it. I can't remember the name of the program. But shortly after I started there, they "tried out" this brand new thing called Quark. 

Several of the books we were printing were being translated into Russian, so I became chummy with the Russian translators, and would help typeset in Russian, using an old Soviet keyboard. I got to where I could type as fast in Russian as I could in English.

It wasn't until years later that I moved fully into Prepress. 

Not a big fan of Microsoft, but I do love how well you an integrate Word docs into a properly styled InDesign document. Most of the world is very familiar with Word, so it's a good way to get work submitted by customers. At a previous place I worked, I set up Word docs for customers to use that would flow into InDesign and autoformat, with the help of GREP'd ¶ Styles. I took an InDesign menu template that was taking my workers 2 hours to set a menu in, and trimmed the time down to approximately 30 seconds, importing from the Word doc I had customers using. 

Although Adobe programs are the main ones we use at work, at home I no longer use any of them, because of the expense of subscriptions, but I still missing being able to set up InDesign ¶ Styles with GREP in them, and Photoshop content aware, and Illustrator image trace. Each of the Adobe programs have some features that are still unmatched by rival software.

[Gavin at MRP · Accepted solution]

Good idea @James Gifford—NitroPress — Looks like there's already a bug report on the PDF presets and it's being worked on. I've upvoted it there, as I should have done in the first place.

Here's the thread for anyone else interested:

https://indesign.uservoice.com/forums/601180-adobe-indesign-bugs/suggestions/48955421-indesign-2025-...

[Marketing1918]

We just had that happen in our office....AFTER I sent an email to all users to disable the automatic update for InDesign and not install the 2025 version until I notified them that it was ready for deployment.  One user went ahead and updated anyway, then opened and saved a bunch of files in 2025 that can't be opened in 2024, and come to find out there's a bug that we can no longer bypass in the new version.  Sigh.

[Marketing1918]

Users that rely on workarounds to disable background exporting of PDF files should not update to InDesign 2025.  Those workarounds do not appear to work in the new version.  

I keep hoping that the new major releases of InDesign will successfully fix this issue.  But of all things don't remove the one option we had that allowed us to reliably export larger, complex InDesign files to PDF.

[prop281218]

It's deleting the PDF presets for me every time I quit and relaunch! And also deletes them for InDesign 2024 too!

So everytime I want to use IND 2025 I woudl need to reload all my presets? 

Honestly, how do these releases make it past beta???

[thiemov46411306]

100% the same problem. Our production is currently stopped. 

[LuckyBoy1978]

Does the names of presets contains non-english letters? Because my issue with presets is only with those that contains cyrillic symbols in my case. If presets contains only english letters, numbers and symbols like % etc then presets stay at place.

[Carolyn36101089yz3q]

This too happened to me - I had my Adobe apps to NOT auto-update but they did. What I can't get to work is the PPDs > ADPDF9.PPD to create custom booklet PDFs for the printer. Does anyone know if there's a newer version for InDesign 2025?

[Martha Lynn Laskie]

Theyre launching before theyre ready! V20.01 has all kinds of problems .My menus keep glitching and it crashes all the time. Also my tool bars freeze! That has never happened to me! Ive been using INDDD since the very begining ! These new floating interfaces are driving me nuts! Dont release something until you got it right! We designers dont send our clients work thats not done! Why the hell are you doing this to us?!